CULTURE
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Holocaust memoirs are a treasure, especially these two OFF THE SHELF HOWARD FREEDMAN My understanding of the Holocaust has been shaped enormously by the teachers, cousins, friends, and others from Europe who have been part of my life and have shared their experi ences before and after World War II. I think about this because we are in the final stages of this historical moment. Within a decade, there will be very few people who can recall Howard Freedman their experiences during the Nazi is the director era. We will need their stories, and of the Jewish nobody will be there to tell them. Community Library, It is for this reason that I am a project of Jewish especially grateful for the wealth of LearningWorks, in memoirs that many survivors have San Francisco. All left behind. And what encourages books mentioned in me is that there are still hundreds this column may be of such works that we have yet to borrowed from the encounter because they have not library. been translated into English. Such is the case with two extraordinary books newly translated from French. Françoise Frenkel, the author of “A Bookshop in Berlin,” was born in Poland in 1889. At a young age she fell in love with French culture and studied at the Sorbonne. She eventually moved to Berlin, where she opened the city’s first French language bookstore, Le Maison du Livre, in 1921 (a rather remarkable feat, given that Germany and France had been at war just three years earlier). She ran the shop until 1939, when it had become abundantly clear that it was time to leave. Her memoir’s original French title translates to “No Place to Lay One’s Head,” and it’s a particularly fitting one, as Frenkel’s existence after leaving Berlin became a life on the run. She moved first to Paris, and then to southern France
after the Nazi invasion. Depending heavily on the kindness of strangers, she spent two years moving from place to place, successfully evading capture until she was betrayed by a guide during an attempt to enter Switzerland. The book, written after her second attempt to cross ille gally into Switzerland succeeded, has an interesting history. It was published in 1943, and it was completely forgotten until a copy was found in a French attic in 2010, leading to its repub lication. It has now been ably translated into English, along with a foreword by Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. Frenkel composed her memoir as Europe’s Jews were still being slaughtered, while Moishe Rozenbaumas was compelled to write “The Odyssey of an Apple Thief” as an elderly man decades later, “so that my grandchildren and the children of my grandchildren will have access to their own history in order that we don’t forget what happened to our people.” Most of Rozenbaumas’ youth was spent in the Lithu anian shtetl of Telz, which was well known as a center of Jewish learning, and he offers a superb portrayal of the town. Moishe’s life changed enormously when his father left for Paris, following the collapse of his clothing business. The plans were for him to send for his family, but he seems to have barely tried. This left Moishe as the family’s chief breadwinner at the age of 11. Following the Nazi invasion of Lithuania, Rozenbaumas attempted unsuccesfully to convince his mother and brothers to flee eastward with him (they would eventually all be shot to death). Still in his teens, he left on his bicycle, crossing into Latvia and then the Soviet Union. He eventually made his way on freighters along the Caspian Sea to Soviet Asia. He soon became a soldier in the Red Army and was wounded multiple times in harrowing battles against Germany. He returned to Lithuania after the war, first as part of a unit interrogating Lithuanians who had collaborated with the Nazis (including a young man who had killed one of Rozen baumas’ brothers). He was then reunited in Vilnius with a
woman he had known well in Telz, and they soon married. Although once an eager member of the Communist Party, Rozenbaumas soured on the Soviet Union, and in 1956 he and his family managed to defect first to Poland and then to France. He was reunited with his father (about whom he remained ambivalent) and entered the clothing business. Rozenbaumas is a particularly introspective narrator. He is haunted by his inability to save his family in Telz, and he interrupts the narrative to lament at length his longtime inability to awaken to what was wrong in the Soviet Union. The book concludes unconventionally with a chapter devoted to religious thought. Drawing heavily from Dutch philosopher Spinoza, Rozenbaumas reflects on his turning toward Judaism later in life — an unexpected outcome given his earlier atheism and the difficulty that many Holocaust survivors had in accepting a deity who would allow such a cataclysm to occur. Jonathan Layton’s translation from French is twice removed from its source, as Rozenbaumas originally wrote his autobiography in Yiddish, and it was lovingly translated into French by his daughter Isabelle in a process that she details in her introduction. May such translations across language, time and place continue, keeping these important voices alive. n
“A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman’s Harrowing Escape from the Nazis” by Françoise Frenkel (288 pages, Atria) “The Odyssey of an Apple Thief” by Moishe Rozenbaumas (248 pages, Syracuse University Press)
Tales of Polish Jews in transition to modernity soar in new translation from Yiddish BOOKS | DONALD WEBER | JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Yiddish emerged as a primary literary language for a rising generation of writers and intellectuals in the small towns of East ern Europe, but even more so, in the vibrant Jewish cultural center of Warsaw. Hersh Dovid Nomberg (1876−1927) was an important figure during this physical and spiritual transition. Raised in a Hasidic family in Mszczonow, Poland, Nomberg rejected his ultra-Orthodox roots and moved at the age of 21 to secular Warsaw, where he joined the coterie of writers around the charismatic Y. L. Peretz. Very litt le of Nomberg’s literary work, which includes poetry, plays, novels and journalism, is available in English. But thanks to the Yiddish Book Center’s new publish ing imprint, White Goat Press, and Daniel Kennedy’s superb translation, we can now
rediscover Nomberg’s poignant, unsett ling and moving stories about uprooted Jews. “Warsaw Stories” invents a landscape inhabited by young Jews in flight from tradition, between worlds, at home nowhere, dreaming, swindling, gossiping, masquerad ing, rebelling, yearning, overcome with rage and shame, and above all feeling lost in a disorienting urban landscape. Nomberg’s most famous character is Fliglman, or “wing man,” a young man in “flight” who appears to be the author’s alterego. He receives Nomberg’s empathy, but is also the object of substantial satire: “His eyes looked like they were fogged up with steam, as if all one needed to do was wipe them with a handkerchief for them to shine brightly.” Fliglman is a romantic with high expec tations and precise requirements for his romantic life. “No shallow soul would ever be
capable of loving him,” Fliglman determines, but he remains clueless about the shallow dimension of his dreamy philosophizing, or his avoidance of female relationships. In the end, Fliglman looms as one of Nomberg’s unmoored comic souls, “an apostate” in the eyes of his family. Perhaps an even thicker portrait of a new Jewish generation is on display in “High er Education.” In this fascinating story, we meet Lyuba Fidler, a young woman of “ sad, clear eyes,” deep powers of observation and fiery political commitments. Fidler moves between a world of weary bourgeois compla cency and unearned comfort, and her own committ ed revolutionary identity. Virtually all the characters in “Warsaw Stories” live m uddled lives, for they remain tangled up in the webs of modern Jewish history. Nomberg’s genius comes from his
ability to register the psychic and emotional valences of this bewildering liminal moment at the turn of the century. Nomberg’s portrait of Jewish life in the early 20th century may be dark, but his imag ination of shadow and despair, of anger and bewilderment, of madness and revolutionary fervor, flows from the landscape of partial assimilation that his characters uneasily inhabit. The newly arrived Jews of “Warsaw Stories” are a richly drawn, recognizable people in motion. Hopefully, we will soon have more Nomberg available in translation, so we can learn more about this neglected but important Jewish writer who emerged on the global literary scene a century ago. n
“Warsaw Stories” by Hersh Dovid Nomberg, translated by Daniel Kennedy (166 pages, White Goat Press)
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